


The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs

by dotfic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-28
Updated: 2009-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:15:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic/pseuds/dotfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda for 5x03. Sam thinks he's not someone Lindsey should get close to. Lindsey disagrees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs

**Author's Note:**

> Coda for 5x03, set a few days after the last scene. Title is from the AA 12-step program. Many thanks to musesfool for betaing.

Lindsay really wants a drink.

No, she needs a drink, and the last time the craving hit her this hard was two months and a day ago. It's so bad that she feels like she might shake from it. She's not shaking, though. Looking down at her hands, she sees how steady they are.

"It's been a few days," Lindsay says, putting her hand in her pocket to rub the sobriety token. It soothes her. "You want to talk about what happened?"

"Not particularly." Keith -- no, _Sam_ \-- moves faster to gather up the dirty glasses and drops them into the plastic bin with sharp clacks.

"Well, I do." She steps around the table, intercepting him as he turns for the kitchen with his load. The bar's closed, but it still smells of fried food and beer. It's after midnight and she wants to put her head down on a table and possibly have a small nervous breakdown.

She hasn't been sleeping well.

She was walking home when she saw it happen, the people with their eyes black and a man lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Then that hunter grabbing her, his eyes damp with fury and grief, he and his friend fleeing, pulling her along with them back towards the bar.

Sam makes a face, pressing his lips together. "Trust me, you don't."

Lindsay turns the token over in her pocket, feeling the lines of the symbol on it. He looks at her and seems more pleading than anything else, despite the curt tone. It's like all the other things about Sam-Keith, Keith-Sam, Sam, Samuel, that don't match, like he's one and one equals some weird obscure mathematical symbol she doesn't know.

She swallows down the quick flash of memories, gleaming knife, taste of adrenaline, Sam's blood-streaked face. "Please?"

Some of the tension eases out of Sam's shoulders as he stares at her. Then he sighs and puts the plastic bin down on a table, carefully, so as not to jostle the glass inside too much. "Okay." His hand ghosts at her elbow, guiding her towards a chair and it's another set of things she can't reconcile, his gentleness and the hardness of his face when he held the knife to that hunter's throat two nights ago.

He sits opposite her.

"First, demons are real," she says, ticking it off with one index finger over the other.

"Yes."

"And everything that's been happening..."

"The apocalypse."

"Shit, seriously?"

"Ghosts are real too. Monsters. Every scary bedtime story you've ever heard." He sounds tired, his voice low, as if he's reciting something he's said too much. Sam leans forward, hands out of sight beneath the table, and a deep crease forms in his forehead as he holds her gaze.

Lindsay's still stuck at _apocalypse_ but lets that go for now. "Those guys said you were a hunter. They weren't talking about Bambi. You...hunt...things. Like, horror movie, if-it's-Tuesday-it-must-be-Buffy, kind of things?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me," she says. "How do you kill a demon?"

Sam-Keith, Keith-Sam's jaw clenches -- she sees the muscle twitch and his eyes go somewhere far away. Then he puts his hands on the table, long fingers and raised veins. He rubs his fingers against the placemat and suddenly looks about twelve years old.

"Listen, Lindsay." She likes how he says her name, careful with the syllables. "I used to think..." He rubs his palm over his lower arm, not quite done with whatever Mexican stand-off is going down in his head. "You don't have to know. This isn't something you want a piece of."

"But they're out there, Sam. Now I know they're out there and I want to --"

"It won't make you safer," he says. When she opens her mouth to argue, he leans forward again. "The most you can hope for is to get a chance to live your life. I can teach you a few things you can use to protect yourself, but beyond that, I just think that maybe..." He gives a quick, coiled nod. "Not everyone should have to open that door."

She wants to hook her fingers through his, trace over the veins on the backs of his hands, but doesn't. "Okay, so tell me."

"Salt repels demons, ghosts, some other things. Ordinary table salt or rock salt will do. Lay a line along the windowsills and the doors. Create a circle of protection. Holy water burns demons. The name of God will force them to reveal themselves. _Christo._ " He pulls his hand away from hers and pushes back his chair. Standing up, he looms over her so she has to crane her neck way back -- more than usual, that is -- to see his face. Sam reaches out for her hand. "Get up."

"What're we doing?"

He grasps her hand and pulls, fingers warm and callused. "I'm going to show you what to do if anyone or anything ever holds a knife to your throat like that again."

Guiding her by the elbows, he places her where he wants her, a few feet clear of the tables, then moves so he's close up behind her. He puts his arm across her chest, palm finding her shoulder.

He shows her how to use his own weight against him, how to break free, how to use her elbows and her feet. They run through it again. The fourth time, her fingers gripped tight around his lower arm, like he showed her, he resists harder to test her and she winds up facing him, their arms and hands and legs tangled, his breath, going a little fast, ruffling the hair on the top of her head. She stands on tiptoe and brushes her mouth over his.

"Lindsay..." He grips her shoulders and eases her down away from him. "I don't think I'm someone you want to get that close to."

"You don't really believe that, do you?" Her fingers go up to touch his jaw.

Sam allows it, though his body's practically singing with tension like an electric wire stretched and about to snap in a storm.

"Yes," he says, and his fingers tighten around her shoulders as he pulls her in, his head lowering until his mouth covers hers.

He kisses her hard, tongue pushing into her mouth, then slides his hands down quick to her waist, grips her and lifts. She wraps her legs tight around him as he helps hold her in place with his palms against her lower back, up under her shirt. The tension in him is turning to heat under her hands. He smells of kitchen smoke and deodorant and sweat. Sam bites at her lower lip, then down along her jaw and her neck while she holds onto his shoulders, skin above the collar of his t-shirt hot against her palms.

Lindsay moves her mouth up near his ear. "There's a couch, in the back room."

Putting her down slow so she slides over his body, Sam keeps on kissing her. It's like he fears she's made of smoke and light, that she'll vanish if he takes too long about this.

She reaches around him to untie his white apron, tosses it aside, and then guides them across the bar, Sam's lips and tongue and teeth working at the curve of her neck. Lindsay kicks the office door open with her foot while Sam starts tugging at her shirt until it's off of her and she's standing there in her jeans and her bra in the tiny office where the desk is messy with papers and there are pictures of local celebrities hanging on the wall.

Sam's pulling off his shirt while she sits on the couch and wriggles out of her jeans. He lowers himself over her, hardly letting her breathe as he kisses her again, pushing her legs up, hands on her thighs. The fabric of the couch is rough under her skin but it'll do. Tracing her fingers over the tattoo on his chest, Lindsay runs her tongue over the mole near his shoulder, then unbuttons his jeans and pulls them down. Sam takes a moment to kick them off before he pulls down the straps of her bra, cups her breasts in his hands, pinching the nipples until they hurt and following that with a gentle sweep of his tongue.

With his hands holding her tight, mouth relentless over her skin, he does this like he's trying to drive something else out, or to prove something -- which is no better than what she's doing. He frightened her, and she doesn't want to be wrong about him; if she's wrong about him maybe she's wrong about other things.

But Lindsay's not sure she wants to be just someone's warm body. But then his fingers go quiet near her face. He strokes her cheekbones, seeing _her_ , and when he grins at her, she sees the person he's trying to get back to.

His mouth travels down her body, gentler now, barely brushing her skin until his head is between her legs, and he licks her until she comes, shuddering with her fingers twisted into his hair.

When he fucks her, it's with her palms braced against the wall above the couch, his body curved around hers from behind and his teeth and tongue against the back of her neck. Everything whites out, and then she feels him come, shouting wordlessly.

They slump down to the couch together, her knees buckling, but he holds her so she doesn't fall, lies down with her curled up on top of him, her head on his chest, her cheek near the tattoo.

"What's this for?" she asks, tilting her head back to look at him.

"I was possessed once." His voice has gone brittle, at odds with the boneless sprawl of his body, the soft way his fingers trail down over her arm. "That's never going to happen again."

"That's right," she says, staring at him levelly. "It's not."

He gives her a faint half-smile, like he almost believes it.

~end


End file.
